Even experts want simpler web software

I follow people who work with many different types of web software. That day, they all had one thing in common. They were all tweeting about Ghost, a new blogging platform that was raising money on Kickstarter.

Ghost has no live demo and it's heavily based on two fairly obscure tools: Node.js and markdown.

However, it flew past it's Kickstarter goal inside one day and has now raised over £100,000.

Why is the idea of Ghost so popular with so many different people? Because it promised a renewed focus on simplicity. The truth is that in 2013 even web experts want simpler software.

Many sites have no menus

How simple are many websites in 2013? Very, very simple.

Until now we've often thought of menus of being the foundation stone of a website. That's no longer true.

Thanks to Joey Kudish and lessbloat for putting these statistics together.

Many sites have no sidebars

Not only navigation, but also design is becoming simpler.

How can you tell if a website was designed in the last 3 years? It has no sidebars.

That's a little bit of an over-simplification, but it's not too far from the truth.

Some of the leading design sites, such as AListApart.com not only have no sidebars on their articles, they don't have room for much of their logo:

The new WordPress theme called Twenty Thirteen lacks sidebars by default. It was explicity designed to work best with a single column layout. WordPress powers about 22% of all new websites and standard will be sidebar-free. You can see the demo here: http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com.

What are people actually using?

Below is a screenshot from Google Trends. The red line is Tumblr and the blue line is WordPress:

He presents daily figures some of the largest platforms on the web. The simpler something is, the more it gets used:

500,000 WordPress posts

40 million Tumblr posts

500 million Tweets

4 billion Facebook shares

Closing thoughts

I don't know if Ghost will succeed in becoming a popular platform, but I know that Ghost has already succeded in one area. It has revealed that there is a huge pent-up demand for simpler web software from the experts, not just the end-users.

We can expect simpler interfaces in future versions of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. And if a challenge emerges to thee dominance of those three major platforms, it will probably come from simpler alternatives.

I'll close with some great quotes on this topic:

Pascal Finette: "Pretty much every software product I use has significantly less features than their earlier competitors."

Chris Dixon: "the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a "toy"."

About the author

Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. He was a teacher for many years before starting OSTraining. Steve wrote the best-selling Drupal and Joomla books.